Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that the process of issuing death certificates following the change to the responsibilities of medical examiners on 9 September 2024 does not lead to undue delays in families being able to arrange funerals.

The Government is monitoring the impact of the death certification reforms, including the Medical Certificate of Cause of Death Regulations 2024, which came into legal effect on 9 September 2024. Early data indicates the median time taken to register a death appears to have risen by one day, from seven days to eight days. This figure is for all deaths, as it includes those certified by a doctor and those investigated by a coroner. The average time taken to register has increased further over the recent Christmas weeks, but this was expected given increases are observed during this period every year; the average is expected to decrease again as more data becomes available for January and February 2025. The median time taken to register a death varies depending on the type of certification. Deaths certified by a doctor, that comprise approximately 80% of deaths registered each week, have typically had a median time to registration of seven days. We note that the medical examiner system was active on a non-statutory basis before the introduction of the statutory system on 9 September 2024, and this makes direct ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparisons challenging to draw conclusions from.

The core purposes of the death certification reforms are to introduce scrutiny of the cause of death to detect and deter malpractice, to improve reporting, and crucially to put the bereaved at the centre of the process by offering a conversation with the medical examiner about the cause of death. The expectation on doctors and medical examiners is clear, that they should complete certification as quickly and efficiently as possible, and the Government is working with all stakeholders to make sure this is the case.